What happened to Linux?

Gullible Jones · 2011-09-16 05:23:01

Just to see how things have changed, I installed CentOS 5.7 (with Xfce 4.4) on my old laptop... It has:

- Instant launching of most desktop applications
- Perfectly smooth window resizing
- Smooth window resizing with a compositor enabled, and using XAA, with no RENDER acceleration at all

The only application that is remotely sluggish is Firefox 3.6, and it still renders web pages faster than Firefox 6 on current distros. And the boot process is of course slow, but that's mostly due to an unfixed bug in the Red Hat initrd system.

So... What happened to make everything on Linux so bloody slow? Why are there complaints about choppy window resize, sluggish launch of desktop apps, etc. when those problems were entirely absent four years ago, and are still entirely absent in some enterprise distros? What's changed?

I'm not trying to troll here, honest. I'm just staggered at the difference in desktop performance I'm seeing, and can't come up with a good answer.

the sad clown · 2011-09-16 05:31:57

Because those people complaining have a problem that needs to be fixed. The people who aren't having a problem aren't complaining. My desktop is very quick and has absolutely no problems resizing/etc.

Additionally, these older systems are designed for older hardware. I suspect they would not scale up very well with newer technologies that have a greater range of capabilities for power conservation and increased performance. Consider the rather obvious example of 32 bit architecture. What are you going to do if your system has more RAM than it can handle? Now multiply that by nearly every other piece of equipment and you start to see why Linux needed to change.

Your example of Firefox 3.6 is another good one. Sure, on low end equipment, it probably is a better choice, but the further it moves away from the current implementation, the less capable it will become of handling modern internet technologies and standards. Hence the need for a new browser that better reflects these realities.

Last edited by the sad clown (2011-09-16 05:35:03)

dammannj · 2011-09-16 10:09:59

\begin{trollmode}Feature Creep. Bling Bling. Moaaa Eye Candy.\end{trollmode}

But seriously: what I think "happened" to "Linux" (that is the major application suites running mainly on Linux), is that developers (and maybe some users, too) felt that "Linux" had to become more user-friendly (from a windows-centric perspective), more "stylish" ...
For me, Windows was always very unfriendly to it's user (me), and when I first came to Linux and tried Gnome, KDE, etc. I felt the same.

Luckily there are alternatives:
Try using "Linux" with some diverse software, put in some little personal "glue" in form of small scripts and you got yourself a faster and friendlier (to you - this is what matters after all) system.

I don't even think that it is always the case that just too many features creep in, but that implementation or presentation of those features suck.
Compare for example firefox and a lightweight browser, like suckless surf (or any other of your liking).

Yes: firefox is more stable, more feature complete, has a gentle learning curve
... And yes, it starts slow, and can feel rather sluggish (in my experience, even on machines that can not be considered old at all.)
You may not have a real alternative if you rely on excellent addons like No-Script or Convergence, at least i have not found one.

But: Some lines of shell script or whatever you like give you a personal version of bookmarks, history, etc. I love dmenu, give it a spin

Gullible Jones · 2011-09-16 11:10:50

Re older distros working better with older hardware - yeah, that's what I'd expect, but this is not older hardware. It's an Aspire 3680 with a 1.6 GHz Celeron M520, which is basically a stripped down Core 2.

And yes, even this relatively fast computer has problems with window resizing on "newer" distros. Especially resizing when using a compositing manager, which is typically slow as molasses - but is as snappy as anything else on CentOS.

I think this probably bespeaks a regression somewhere, no? If only I could figure out where.

karabaja4 · 2011-09-16 11:26:22

I opened a similar thread a while back: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=108651

Of course, this is very subjective, so while some would say it feels sluggish, others will say "works for me" ™

I agree the problem is real, just don't know who to blame.

Gullible Jones · 2011-09-16 11:54:38

What irritates me most, I think, is the whole "We need Wayland, we need everything rendered on the GPU, we need to reinvent everything!" deal. We had a great working desktop four years ago. Granted that I'm not a developer, it seems to me the answer is fixing what we've got, not creating something completely new (and full of even more bugs).

pogeymanz · 2011-09-16 12:29:20

karabaja4 wrote:

I opened a similar thread a while back: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=108651
Of course, this is very subjective, so while some would say it feels sluggish, others will say "works for me" ™
I agree the problem is real, just don't know who to blame.

That's how I feel as well. My best guess is that it's actually the drivers (especially the graphics drivers). I feel like every time there is a new graphics driver, they'll add support for some more hardware but introduce regressions in a bunch of already supported hardware.

The Kernel has been frustrating me lately as well. All these increased power usage regressions are infuriating.

Gullible Jones · 2011-09-16 12:40:22

Due to annoying bugs in CentOS and because I have too much time on my hands right now, I decided to put Debian Lenny (oldstable) on the laptop... And what's this... OMG a clue! Text scrolls much faster on the VGA console than it did with more recent kernels!

Lame hypothesis: recent kernel versions have introduced hideous performance regressions on desktop machines.

Further lame hypothesis: the -ck kernel patchset is designed for desktops, not servers.

Compiling a patched kernel is not hard or terribly time-consuming, so I'll try it and see if that improves things.

Edit: bah, can't get -ck because kernel.org is down. Trying Liquorix instead...

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2011-09-16 12:53:04)

tomk · 2011-09-16 12:42:36

Gullible Jones wrote:

Further lame hypothesis: the -ck kernel patchset is designed for desktops, not servers.

Uhh.... fact, not hypothesis.

Gullible Jones · 2011-09-16 13:26:35

Yeah, I omitted the next sentence, which would have been something like, "Thus it will perform better on a desktop than the vanilla kernel."

Edit: Hmm, I think I can say right away one thing that gives the impression of speediness... Window frames are not synced to widget rendering, so the window can be pulled around even if the widgets haven't finished redrawing. This is *not* smooth resize, but it prevents the feeling of choppiness and lack of response with heavy stuff like OpenOffice. IOW the current way of doing things with synchronized window frames is psychologically less effective.

But it looks like there's something else going on too - OpenOffice starts roughly twice as fast on Lenny on this computer as it does on Squeeze for instance. Unless there were big performance regressions in OOo 3.x, I think that says something.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2011-09-16 14:22:16)

karol · 2011-09-16 15:20:03

Different strokes for different folks https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=119258
Similarly infuriating is that you can't tap into your brand new GPU because of decades-old windowing environment. I mean, RAM is dirt-cheap, you can get lots of juice from a sub-$100 GPU, so why everyone clings so much to the past? :-)

pseudonomous · 2011-09-16 15:46:02

A thought:

the RHEL/CentOS 5 series is old enough that it probably predates that big changes in xf86-video-intel that introduced things like KMS and UXA acceleration, the kernel's old enough not to contain alot of changes to the kernel's interface to graphics hardware that intel's changes to their Xorg driver relied on as well.

If you really want to burn some time, try and compile the old Xorg version from CentOS on top of a newer kernel and compare graphics performance.

As for application performance, it might have something to do with the widgit toolkits, but it's hard to say. Another thread pointed out that gtk2 themes can have a surprisingly large effect on performance.

Mr_ED-horsey · 2011-09-16 16:08:14

I haven't had too much of a problem with my OS or the kernel being slow myself, but then again my laptop is only 8 months old and my desktop is just about 4 months old. The only actual problems I've had in the last year or so are software related ie. Firefox and 64 bit Flash. I temporarily solved the Flash issue by switching to 32 bit Arch on my desktop. The Flash Plugin from multilib never really worked right for me on 64 bit. Lots of crashes and overheating. The Flash 11 beta doesn't overheat anything but it still crashes often. 32 bit is working fine although it only reads 3 of my 4 GiBs of RAM, but as soon as Adobe comes out with a stable version of 11 I'm switching back. Firefox 6 is horrible in regards to speed, so I ended up switching to Chromium probably permanently too. Which I am amazed I'm saying that. I'm 30 and I've barely ever used another browser besides Firefox. When I was a kid it was Netscape. When that went under I started using Firefox. They really screwed things up with their new release cycle imho.

Leonid.I · 2011-09-16 17:38:43

Gullible Jones wrote:

What irritates me most, I think, is the whole "We need Wayland, we need everything rendered on the GPU, we need to reinvent everything!" deal. We had a great working desktop four years ago. Granted that I'm not a developer, it seems to me the answer is fixing what we've got, not creating something completely new (and full of even more bugs).

What is wrong with wayland? I don't care where my windows are drawn, as long as it will remove suid from X... I used to run linuxes starting with fedora 8 on my laptop, and can tell that newer kernels add roughly 15-20 min to battery lifetime compared to f8's 2.6.23.

Besides, have you actually considered the fact that centos kernel is configured differently (sysctl) from your arch, uses different filesystem drivers, etc... Without these elaborations, I don't think your comparison makes much sense.

kokoko3k · 2011-09-16 18:26:37

Gullible Jones: try to use the very same gtk theme and window decoration style in a newer system, and i bet you'll have fast solid window resizing too.
Deal with how fonts are smoothed too (does they look the same on that centos?).

Maybe you're right about the time the applications needs to open (but firefox is better nowdays), but you have to consider that probably they gives you more functions.

ANOKNUSA · 2011-09-16 19:23:49

Gullible Jones wrote:

What irritates me most, I think, is the whole "We need Wayland, we need everything rendered on the GPU, we need to reinvent everything!" deal. We had a great working desktop four years ago. Granted that I'm not a developer, it seems to me the answer is fixing what we've got, not creating something completely new (and full of even more bugs).

Okay, I don't think there's any way to say this without sounding like an asshole, so I'll just say it: Correct me if I'm wrong, but more than once in this thread--and more than once in other threads--you've brought up this "smooth resize" issue. Yet while complaining about niggling graphical issues that don't affect productivity, you still expect a chunk of code designed and written almost 30 years ago to give you features that far more up-to-date windowing systems provide, while dismissing the idea of up-to-date graphics rendering software. You also benchmark GTK+ engines, compare current web browsers to those around years ago, etc., etc. without taking into account the different hardware used by different machines, the drastic changes in web content over the last couple years, software bloat not related to the Linux kernel, and so on. You focus on minute details while overlooking larger pictures, or disregarding concomitants. It seems to me that you're an exceedingly picky person, with standards far higher that the average user. Seriously: who bencharks widget sets to determine which one is gonna save half a second in rendering time? I can't say I've noticed anything to suggest something "happened" to Linux; I think some people just need to slow down and savor life some more.

nathan28 · 2011-09-18 04:25:54

karabaja4 wrote:

I opened a similar thread a while back: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=108651
Of course, this is very subjective, so while some would say it feels sluggish, others will say "works for me" ™
I agree the problem is real, just don't know who to blame.

Vs. the OP's 1.6 Ghz, my old 1.4Ghz Celeron is painfully slow and crappy on Arch, Debian, Slackware, Mint, Ubuntu, even on older versions of Mint. It boots fast in BSD but that's where the improvement stops.

Last edited by nathan28 (2011-09-18 04:26:17)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-09-16 05:23:01

What happened to Linux?

#2 2011-09-16 05:31:57

Re: What happened to Linux?

#3 2011-09-16 10:09:59

Re: What happened to Linux?

#4 2011-09-16 11:10:50

Re: What happened to Linux?

#5 2011-09-16 11:26:22

Re: What happened to Linux?

#6 2011-09-16 11:54:38

Re: What happened to Linux?

#7 2011-09-16 12:29:20

Re: What happened to Linux?

#8 2011-09-16 12:40:22

Re: What happened to Linux?

#9 2011-09-16 12:42:36

Re: What happened to Linux?

#10 2011-09-16 13:26:35

Re: What happened to Linux?

#11 2011-09-16 15:20:03

Re: What happened to Linux?

#12 2011-09-16 15:46:02

Re: What happened to Linux?

#13 2011-09-16 16:08:14

Re: What happened to Linux?

#14 2011-09-16 17:38:43

Re: What happened to Linux?

#15 2011-09-16 18:26:37

Re: What happened to Linux?

#16 2011-09-16 19:23:49

Re: What happened to Linux?

#17 2011-09-18 04:25:54

Re: What happened to Linux?

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